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Because the action of Go Set a Watchman takes place 20 years later than the story of To Kill a Mockingbird, it feels like a sequel. But really, it’s more like a ghost: the spectre of Harper Lee’s restless, ardent thoughts in progress. It is now clear that her original editor, Tay Hohoff, deserved a Pulitzer for turning it into the masterful To Kill a Mockingbird.

It was hard to deny the baleful, dispiriting power of this New York novel about the ineradicable harm of childhood abuse, long and wrenching though it was. Although shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Marlon James pipped it to the post.

The most controversial biography of the began five years ago with the cooperation of the Hughes estate, but the family later withdrew that support, fearing Bate was straying from the agreed remit of a strictly “literary life”. As a consequence, Bate says, copyright restrictions have forced him to replace Hughes’s words with his own and focus on the biography – in other words, to go in exactly the direction the family dislikes. Bate’s archival work is extensive; the problem is what he does with it. Much of his reading takes place between the lines, and his biographical descriptions are full of crass supposition and snobbery.

As has been well documented in the press, the past year has been a nightmare for Nigella Lawson. She alludes lightly to her difficulties in her introduction to Simply Nigella. “We cannot control life by controlling what we eat. But how we cook and, indeed, how we eat does give us – as much as anything can – mastery over ourselves.” The queen of indulgence has been chastened and these recipes are not as unhealthy as those in her previous books.

The comedian and Great British Bake Off presenter nails the art of slyly making her whole memoir about what it will and won’t reveal. Spectacles begins by confronting the troubling question of how to write about your family when you know they’re reading. Alongside powerful passages about illness and loss comes the moment she apologised to the owners of a snake sanctuary for calling it “the worst holiday venue ever” and the gorillagram who dry-humped her on her 30th birthday while shouting “Mel!” Even as you recoil, you laugh.

This is the first time that Iain Banks’s poems have been published, and they share more with his science fiction than with his literary novels: they are angry, experimental poems studded with sex and violence, puns, myths, gods and apocalyptic warfare. There’s space for beauty, too. “You have turned me on a quiet,/ creamy spit of stars,” he writes, but then: “You have split me like a cheap brick.”

How little leaders ever seem capable of learning from history and how seldom they know when to stop is the thesis of Alistair Horne’s Hubris, a history of war in the 20th century. After writing on warfare for 50-odd years, he closes with this warning: “If one can read the tea leaves correctly, the Pacific theatre may well be the arena for future disputes between the major world players.”

Some of Bruce Forsyth’s warmest memories are his most recent ones, depending on how much you find to read between the lines in his account of retirement from Saturday evening television. His reminiscences take the form of a long chat about photographs. It is, at best, like a slide show: you can skip a few when he lingers too long.

Many good crime novels died of neglect this year in the stampede to buy Paula Hawkins’s debut thriller. With an alcoholic narrator so unreliable that she can’t trust herself, this is one of the best of the “domestic noir” novels that have proliferated in the wake of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. Hawkins deploys her stock of authorial conjuring tricks to deliciously befuddling effect, but in the end her characters stay flat on the page.

A selective autobiography in which the 43-year-old from Gloucester explains what inspired her recent shows and also pilfers and develops her past material. It reads very much like a stand-up routine, from the running gags and callbacks. Whatever the seriousness of the subject she’s discussing, however passionately she’s laying into her pet hates, Christie never forgets also to make herself an object of mirth, and does so with charm and brio to spare.

Mayer, a TIME magazine journalist, doesn’t lift any lids on the Prince of Wales at all – instead, her biography arranges research into a book-length opinion, a portrait of the future King as a “renegade” intent on “improving the human condition and fixing a battered world”. That may be a stretch, but either way it’s not especially profound. Mayer’s is a good piece of journalism, expanded like bubblegum to the length of a book.

The self-chronicler par excellence, Kim Kardashian doesn’t seem to mind what she puts out there. Some of the most revealing selfies in Selfish were hacked from her iCloud, but other equally intimate shots were her own posts. It’s actually refreshing to see her so in control. She manifests herself as the ultimate celebrity: frank on her own terms, basking in her freedom. She gives us pretty much everything, endlessly, in swaggering style. And that’s what we wanted, right?

The latest novel by the reliably (sometimes notoriously) highbrow John Banville laid its scene in a steampunk Ireland criss-crossed by roving airships, where time seemed to be running backwards. When Banville gets it right, his eloquence draws you into another world. At times, though, the heightened language can feel precious. Readers who would rather not indulge his cloudy evocations of lost time would probably get along better with his thriller-writing alter ego, Benjamin Black.

If we wonder what it was like to be Einstein, it seems Einstein spent much of his time wondering what it was like to be human, at least according to Carlo Rovelli in his surprise bestseller, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics. In the last of his seven lessons, Rovelli argues that the physics of human consciousness is the last great question because it frames and shapes everything else.

Jax Miller shows promise in her debut novel. Freedom Oliver, who has been in witness protection for 18 years working as a barmaid in Oregon, steals a motorbike and heads for Kentucky when she discovers that some enemies may be looking for the daughter she was forced to give up for adoption two decades earlier. Beautiful, boozy, unstable and lion-brave, Freedom ought to belong in a comic book, but comes blisteringly to life on the page.

For those of us still hazy about the reigns of George IV or King Stephen, there is always Gimson’s Kings and Queens, a fast-paced refresher with rococo detailing. Never mind Edward II’s horrid demise with a red-hot poker; who knew that as an effort to understand his people, he got craftsman to teach him how to thatch houses? Not all history is about hacking violence.

Steve Coogan appeared before Lord Leveson’s enquiry and took on News International, so he’s a known defender of individual privacy. Nonetheless, in his memoir Easily Distracted (Century, £20), he’s quick to tell us that he’s been a schmuck: “I had an affair when my girlfriend was pregnant with our daughter… And then I had another affair. I know it was entirely my fault and I behaved selfishly.”

The second and final volume in James Kaplan’s admiring 1,800-page study picks up in 1953 where Sinatra: The Voice left off four years ago, as his career is revived and his marriage to Gardner ends. The novelist considers Sinatra’s art and his relationship with JFK, which ended when Bobby Kennedy put paid to a planned president stay chez Sinatra and the singer trashed the rooms he’d had built for the purpose.

In his new book, Jamie Oliver he warns of coconut oil’s “fictitious benefits” and says it might increase your chances of heat disease. From the photograph on the front cover, Oliver has lost some weight. This year he also campaigned for a tax on sugar and so he is clearly out to improve all our eating habits.

The finest crime novel of the year begins with two pages listing the names of journalists who have “disappeared” in Mexico. This sprawling novel demonstrates how the US war on drugs has resulted in Mexico coming under the rule of gangsters. As a study of a nation through its crimes, it is an equal to Marlon James’s Booker Prize-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings.

Paula Zuccotti travelled around the world to find people of all ages, from a toddler in Tokyo to a cowboy in Arizona, from a cleaner in London to a cloister nun in Madrid. She asked them to document every object they touched in 24 hours, then she gathered those objects together and photographed them in a single shot. Her absorbing and beautiful book collects together these photographs and profiles.

The surprise revelation of Richard Dawkins’s latest memoir is that he believes external nature is unknowable and the role of science is simply to provide the ideas that best describe it. But why, he wonders, are some ideas better than others?

Terry Gilliam is the odd man out of the Python squad, the warm and loose American among uptight Englishmen. Yet he may be the team's secret weapon. His carnivalesque lettering and animated cut-outs of stomping feet and bathing beauties tied the Pythons’ sketches together. His characteristic mix of passion, infinite care and ham-fistedness is evident in this handsome memoir that manages to combine beautiful design with an often infuriating jumble of repetitions, offhand comments and mistakes.

At the Somme on July 1 1916, Britain suffered nearly the same number of fatalities (19,240) as it did in the whole of the Dardanelles, making it “the greatest single-day disaster ever to overcome British arms”, according to Andrew Roberts in his account of that day. “You didn’t have to aim, we just fired into them,” recalled a German musketeer of the troops walking steadfastly towards him. One English private raged: “The cream of British manhood was shattered in less than six hours… It was pure bloody murder.”

The diplomatic editor of Newsnight describes how the Nato powers have chosen the path of wholesale disarmament. By 2014, for example, not a single American tank was permanently stationed in Europe and Spain’s air force was down to six combat-ready fighters. In the summer of 2014, when Russia invaded Ukraine, the British Army possessed only 36 operational main battle tanks. An essential alarm bell about Western military weakness.

Margaret Atwood’s savage comedy imagined a post-crash America where families rotated monthly between suburban homes and experimental prisons. Overall it's a strange fish: a sex comedy crossed with a stern satire on predatory big business in the shape of a knockabout action romp.

Whether analysing the creation myth of Romulus and Remus, or the development of the Roman calendar, or detailing the intense violence and rape by which this city state grew into a vast empire, Beard is a brilliant guide to this alien culture. Anyone who imagines they are familiar with the Romans should be prepared to think again; each chapter is rich in detail, from citizens’ private letters to analyses of sanitation.

This first novel by the German screenwriter Sascha Arango gave us the out-and-out anti-hero of the year in Henry Hayden, a feted crime novelist whose books are actually written by his wife. Arango has a wonderful way of defamiliarising everyday life, with the result that Henry’s psychotic schemes seem no less bizarre than what the rest of us get up to.

This is a fine edition of Smith’s melancholy and macabre poems, which will always resonate, but her drawings are a mixed bag. Some are doodles that do little to illuminate the poems, though many show careful style and an intriguingly developed visual language, with nods to Eric Gill and Picasso.

According to the records, Hitler never visited a single concentration camp, incarcerating himself in the Berghof, his mountain fastness on the Obersalzberg. Hitler at Home contains previously unseen photographs of the interior, designed by Gerdy Troost, including the home cinema where, for Christmas 1937, Hitler watched 18 Mickey Mouse films given to him by his propaganda minister Goebbels.

Olia Hercules’s cookbook is a beautifully produced homage to Ukrainian cuisine. There is a great selection of soups, including a blood-red cold beetroot and a lovely flavoursome mushroom broth with buckwheat. Amid this year’s proliferation of “simple” cookbooks, it was good to be reminded of a culture in which a hearty appetite signals a healthy interest in food and in life.

By the end of August 1944, the Wehrmacht was in hectic flight. On December 16, Hitler decided to counter-attack from the Ardennes. He hoped to repeat his army’s surprise dash through the pine forests in 1940; and to emulate Operation Michael which had so nearly brought a German victory in March 1918. The story is reliably well told by Antony Beevor: the Führer’s final gasp ended with the flattening of whole villages. Swallows returning the following spring were disoriented. To this day, Beevor tells us, local landowners can’t sell their timber “because of the shards of metal buried deep in the massive conifers”.

David Horspool, having attended the recent reinterment of the kingly bones, considers the monarch’s reputation in his lifetime and through subsequent ages. From the Princes in the Tower to the grief Richard suffered at the death of his son, it is absorbing and authoritative. It also proves that artists rather than kings are the masters of history: no amount of documentation that Horspool could ever unearth will supersede the gloating horror of Shakespeare’s Richard III.

Douglas-Fairhurst writes about the Victorians, but not as we know them. The Story of Alice examines the circumstances behind Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, and Lewis Carroll’s young muse, Alice Liddell. Children were, said Carroll, “three fourths” of his life, but Douglas-Fairhurst does not believe he saw them in a sexual light. Instead he suggests that Carroll found in small girls a retreat from sexual ideas; they represented Paradise before the fall.

The Booker shortlist brought well-deserved attention to Sunjeev Sahota’s The Year of the Runaways, which told the stories of a houseful of Indian migrants in Sheffield and made a fascinating counterpoint to a summer of heated immigration headlines.

Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek believes the universe is organised around principles of beauty and goes on to suggest that, even if he is wrong, it is a powerful illusion that feeds our appetites and intuitions.

When hostilities commenced in 1914, there had been no general, continental war in Europe for 100 years, Kershaw reminds us in his authoritative survey. The armies that went into battle in 1914 were 19th-century armies “about to fight a 20th century war” ­– in which humans were destroyed anonymously and in huge numbers by modern technology.

Tom Jones doesn’t let us get far beneath his orange mask in his memoir Over the Top and Back, but the book’s packed with great showbiz anecdotes, including the time Elvis snuck into the Welshman’s bathroom, sang to him in the shower and left a little memento in the loo.

An assured selection of his verse from 1989-2014, published just before he was elected the new Oxford Professor of Poetry in June. It charts Armitage’s work from the early, intimately conversational poems of his first full collection, Zoom! (1989), through his 1992 Forward prize-winning breakthrough collection, Kid, and on to the present, via a purple patch of re-imaginings of classical and medieval British literature. Something of Seamus Heaney’s skill in combining clarity of expression with glorious detail resonates in these lines from Armitage’s lovely 2013 poem, “Rain”: “to take one drop/ on the tongue, tasting/ cloud-pollen,/ grain of the heavens,/ raw-sky”.

Magnus Mills’s latest novel is another of his uniquely absurdist fictions, this one a Kafka-lite allegory of the history of Britain set in a large field whose inhabitants bicker ceaselessly over the intricacies of tent-pitching and land management.

Kate Atkinson’s companion piece to Life After Life (2013) seemed at first to spurn the time-bending tricks of its predecessor, but its deeply moving, intensely observed story of a war veteran growing old in the second half of the 20th century hid some startling temporal and narrative tricks.

Hastings made his name with his histories of active combat. This is his first sortie into the secret world of spies, codebreakers and guerrillas. He puts their achievements in context by measuring them against competing sources of secret intelligence - not just in Britain but in the other main belligerent countries, including Germany, the Soviet Union, Japan and the United States. The result is authoritative, exciting and notably well written.

One of this year’s most useful books on the phenomenon was Isis: the State of Terror, which showed how the terrorist movement “emerged from the mind” of a Jordanian criminal who called himself Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

In his seventh novel, Ishiguro makes the bizarre choice of staging his habitual drama of indirection within the tropes of fantasy literature. The setting is a sixth or seventh-century Britain of myth and legend: a land thronged with giants, pixies, dragons, ogres and sword-swinging Arthurian knights who acquire a sort of majestic banality in Ishiguro’s passionless dialogue and narration.

Drawing on 73,000 files in the Düsseldorf archive, The Gestapo by Frank McDonough (Coronet, £20) reveals that Germany’s dreaded secret police rarely numbered more than 16,000 officers, mainly career detectives who, relying on tip-offs from the public, “posed no real threat to law-abiding citizens”. Calibrating its violence so that the majority of Germans did not feel it, the Nazi terror system showed its brutal face to a clearly defined set of opponents.

Paul Strohm explores the world that Chaucer observed – from the Peasants Revolt to the tyranny of Richard II. From this atmosphere of unease and economic insecurity somehow sprang Chaucer’s wit and sly forbearance, as well as the triumphant emergence of English in its modern form. Strohm’s is also a thrillingly immersive portrait of 14th-century London: in his dark, slit-windowed apartments at Aldgate, Chaucer was daily deafened by the peals of innumerable church bells, the music of London.

The late Stieg Larsson’s partner Eva Gabrielsson predicted that thunderbolts would be directed from Heaven towards David Lagercrantz, commissioned to continue his Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series, but there has been no celestial indication of whether Larsson is pleased or dismayed that Lisbeth Salander has been so convincingly resurrected in his absence.

The neurologist Oliver Sacks, who died not long after this memoir was published, writes about biking, wearing leather and coming out to his dad. In fact, it was his father who enquired first. Sacks had just turned 18 in 1951, when his father asked: “Perhaps you prefer boys?” His mother called him “an abomination” when she heard, and his brother attempted to cure him with a visit to a female prostitute in Paris. His memoir is simply told, a retrospective account interspersed with passages from journals.

Tom McCarthy’s Booker-shortlisted Satin Island was a dissertation on technocapitalist confusion disguised as a novel, featuring a “corporate anthropologist” with an initial for a name, who lurks in the ill-ventilated basement of a vast company as he tries to compile a report no one will read on a project no one understands.

Patrick deWitt’s Undermajordomo Minor was slighter and more mannered than his Booker-nominated Western The Sisters Brothers (2011), but its dreamlike Euro-Gothic fantasy, with strong comic notes of Terry Gilliam’s 1988 film The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen, cast a powerful spell.

Peter Longerich’s exhaustive biography shows how Hitler’s propaganda minister, a failed novelist with a club foot, managed to persuade the German people that they were beleaguered patriots caught up in an unwanted conflict forced on them by Allied machinations.

The short novel Slade House is a companion piece to its gigantic predecessor, The Bone Clocks. “It’s almost a dessert if you’ve read The Bone Clocks,” he says, “and a starter if you haven’t, and hopefully a standalone amuse-bouche if you’re not going to, which is fine.” Told in five parts, by speakers who relate their stories in the present tense from “the foremost tachyon of the wave of time that’s moving through the narrative”, it revolves around a creepy mansion that appears every nine years, in defiance of the laws of physics, behind a metal door on a London street.

Elijah Wald’s terrific Dylan Goes Electric! does a great job of unpicking the myths around Mr Zimmerman’s decision to shock the Kumbaya crowd by amping up at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Although rock fans romanticise this moment as a triumph of youth, Wald makes an corrective case for another version, “in which the audience represents youth and hope, and Dylan was shutting himself off behind a wall of electric noise, locking himself in a citadel of wealth and power”.

There was a madcap combination of greed and ignorance hanging over the early decades of British dominion over India, from the 18th century onwards. Ferdinand Mount has a dog in this fight, as they say: members of his family, the Lows, were among those who set about establishing this jewel in Britain’s imperial diadem. And in his study, The Tears of the Rajas, the Lows are far from being imperial monsters; transplanted from lowland Scotland, they are instead witnesses to monstrosity, and some harrowing episodes – the Afghan retreat and the savagery of the Indian Mutiny.

81 Austerities, Riviere’s impish debut, won him a Forward Prize (Best First Collection) when Faber published the poems he had written as a blog in response to the Coalition’s cuts. In fact, 81 Austerities’ short monologues spoke more often of love affairs and supermarkets than about cutbacks at the ministry. Kim Kardashian’s Marriage, its sequel, is similar. Monologue form remains, but Kim Kardashian has replaced austerity as the background symbol, rarely mentioned but often felt.

Murdoch is an engaging, almost girlish correspondent, and the evidence here ranges from early letters written to a schoolfriend about pre-war London (“I love the city, and if it’s going to be smashed up, I want to be there”) to her last confused words, written two years before she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s (“Please forgive all this stumbling”). But the best bit of Murdoch’s letters are her sign-offs, which could easily be standalone poems. “It’s pouring with rain and I must go out to tea with some Belgians. Damn,” she writes. She ends another letter: “Asking you not to be an ass, I embrace you.” Yet another: “With love, ever your complicated girl/ I”. Sometimes, there is simply: “ever/ Iris”. And, best of all: “Most tenderly/ I am your/ I”.

Set on a Catholic retreat in north-east England in the Seventies, this spooky debut novel manages to mix the rainy seascapes and half-glimpsed horrors of the supernatural tradition with a strain of British weirdness that evokes the tweediness, threatening comedy and intimidating countryside of Withnail and I as much as it does the freaked-out paganism of The Wicker Man. Hurley is also superb on nature: water from a holy well is “black and silky-looking with a smell of autumn deadfall and eggs”.

JK Rowling’s publishers asked the artist Jim Kay to illustrate not one but all seven of the Harry Potter books, for glorious new large-scale editions, over the next seven years. He was stunned. As Kay puts it: “You don’t want to be known as the person who ruins the most popular children’s book in history.” But after almost two years of work, seven days a week, Kay’s illustrated edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone is a triumph – a book so alive it seems to jump, explode and slither out of your hands as you read. Rowling has given it her public seal of approval: “Seeing Jim Kay’s illustrations moved me profoundly,” she wrote for the dust jacket.

A Spool of Blue Thread reminded us that Anne Tyler, a writer often dismissed as cosy, can write a barbed family saga that puts younger imitators to shame. “Like most families,” Tyler says of the Whitshanks, her main characters, “they imagined they were special.” From some writers, this would be a remark pitched somewhere between the snide and the openly scornful. In Tyler’s case, it combines sharpness, tenderness, satire and rueful comedy in eight words — possibly with a touch of admiration thrown in.

In KL (the initials stand for Konzentrationslager), Nikolaus Wachsman focuses specifically on the story of the camps themselves, illuminating step-by-step how they evolved. Using a vast and sometimes untapped range of accounts and sources, he documents the first of the camps, in 1933, when such places were used by Hitler for the internment of political enemies (many of whom happened to be Jewish). At first, violence from the guards and officers was psychotic and random; then the SS came in and gave a bureaucratic structure to torture, forced labour and death.

Adventures of the classic kind await in The Secrets of the Wild Wood, the sequel to The Letter for the King, Tonke Dragt’s unmissable Arthurian-inflected tale written in Dutch in 1962 and recently translated into English by Laura Watkinson. In this novel for the under-12s, Tiuri must venture into the Wild Wood in search of a brother knight, and encounter all kids of dangers.

Christopher Tyerman delves into the complex layers of desire that motivated the different crusaders. There is a deeper story here about the rise in Britain of both class structure and bureaucracy (in the early medieval period, scrupulous record-keeping arose for those “taking the Cross”). The geopolitical tsunami of Islam’s rise provoked Europe’s march away from feudalism: just as theatre-going today is apparently a measure of middle-classness, so by the 13th century embarking on Crusade had become a social aspiration for bakers, blacksmiths, physicians and tailors.

Silence Is Goldfish is a witty, heart-warming novel for teenagers. Tessa discovers she is the product of a sperm donation. Her father, though actually a pretty good dad, is now suddenly the enemy. This is a lovely story about overcoming convention, and coming to accept yourself.

Adam Sisman’s respectful and unsycophantic biography was composed with the cooperation of its living subject – though in the case of le Carré’s time in the secret service, not quite enough cooperation for the biographer’s taste. “It would be disingenuous to suggest that there have not been difficulties between us,” Sisman writes.

In the gripping 1606, a follow-up to his prize-winning 1599 (2006), James Shapiro draws parallels between James I’s nervy accession and the Gunpowder Plot with Shakespeare’s bleak masterpiece, King Lear, and its themes of divided kingdoms and poisoned inheritance. London in 1606, so colourfully conveyed by Shapiro, was a city of plague and witchcraft, its king a student of demonology. It took the clear gaze of the playwright to shape the neurosis of the age into an immortal work.

Elvis Costello is self-critical in his memoir, and not without cause. “I could be an arrogant bastard. Bravado and alcohol made me amplify whatever was roasting my goat,” he concedes in his bulky and scrappy Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink, which finds him squirming over his philandering and the famous racist remark he made about Ray Charles, while being typically sharp and funny on songwriting.

For a series of scenes from Brooklyn life, 10:04 is remarkably eventful. The main character, a writer called Ben (no coincidence) learns he has a potentially fatal heart condition; he attempts to inseminate his best friend, Alex, who sees her opportunity to have a child running out; a student has a psychotic episode in his office; two hurricanes, bookending the novel, sweep through New York. Out of the ephemera of everyday life, Lerner has created a work of great artifice, knitted together by dozens of images.

During his first presidential term, Ronald Reagan was portrayed as a warmonger; in The End of the Cold War, Robert Service presents precisely the reverse: a naturally intelligent, good-humoured, well-balanced strategist who wanted to see all threat of nuclear war removed. The narrative tension in Service’s account is extraordinary, right up until the day in 1989 when East German citizens dared to hack at the Berlin Wall. When Reagan and equally intelligent Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev began their tentative summits in 1985, they had the firepower between them to destroy the world. How did two men from opposing ideologies sit by a fire and talk humanity away from the precipice of destruction?

The Importance of Elsewhere is a portrait in a visual sense, a beautiful edition of Philip Larkin’s photographs: quiet, watchful images of his friends and lovers, landscapes and medieval churches. Self-portraits show Larkin as a serious figure with an intense gaze, sometimes self-mocking and often bordering on voyeuristic. Anyone who’s ever read his poems will feel a frisson of recognition.

A novel for teenagers rich in detail and tone. In Unbecoming, in order to deal with three generations of troubled women in her family, our heroine Katie must gather herself up and start to become who she really is.

London’s visual leitmotif became famous the world over: thick, cloying fogs, from bitter yellow to great slabs of brown air that made spit turn black. Corton guides us through the history of the “pea-souper” (the phrase first used in print in 1849 by Herman Melville); from Victorian women fearful of attack in the impenetrable murk, to the poets, artists and film-makers who thrived on its metaphorical potential; from the political rows over domestic coal fires to the dreadful 1952 Great Smog which claimed thousands of lives and was so thick that, even indoors, office workers could not see to the end of the corridor.

Timed to mark what would have been Sinatra’s 100th birthday, and created in collaboration with his family, Sinatra 100 is packed with photographs which both examine and extol the impact of one extraordinary voice. With forewords by fellow crooner Tony Bennett and casino magnate Steve Wynn, and including excerpts from interviews with Sinatra himself, comes a rare opportunity to see hitherto unpublished images of the artist as a young boy, a rascally teen, and later a husband, father and friend.

The beheadings, crucifixions and dismemberments being broadcast from the lands between Syria and Iraq are often called “medieval”; but as Peter Frankopan demonstrates in The Silk Roads (Bloomsbury), this is fantastically unfair. There was a time, over 1,000 years ago, when people of this region were visionary in their religious tolerance, the Muslims from Arabia most insistent that devout Jews and Christians “have nothing to fear or regret”. Frankopan’s breathtaking and addictively readable study argues that the trade routes between the Mediterranean and China, all those merchant convoys of exquisite silks and rare spices, were the true beating heart of the world, and soon will be again.

Ivan Maisky was Soviet ambassador to London during the Second World War. In 1953, he was arrested by the KGB and accused of being a British spy. His 1,500-page diary, edited by Gorodetsky, is a gripping mixture of scholarship and gossip, filled with uncensored sketches of Churchill, Eden, Chamberlain and Lloyd George.

Although often beautifully written, Hynde’s memoir sees the Pretenders’ front woman assuming reponsibility for the behaviour of the many men who’ve treated her badly, from Iggy Pop to the bikers who flicked lit matches at her naked ribcage in the early Seventies.

A French woman interned at Ravensbrück, a Nazi concentration camp solely for women, lamented: “Nobody, but nobody could have described it – nobody would have believed it.” In her ground-breaking chronicle of that camp, Sarah Helm quotes a prisoner’s report that conditions in the women’s blocks “passed all imagination and everything was black with lice”.

Niall Ferguson was appointed by his subject to write this two-volume biography. No doubt this was because of his clear qualities as a historian rather than for his allegiances, yet in this first volumes, Ferguson claims to be puzzled by the “vitriol” and “visceral hostility” shown in some quarters towards his subject. It’s surprising that Ferguson is surprised, but no matter. The joke used to go that once Kissinger had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize political satire was obsolete; by the same token, a Nobel Prize-winner can hardly be deemed to require rehabilitation, so Ferguson has a free hand. The trickiest material will come in the proposed second volume.

Adam Mars-Jones’s funny and subtle memoir concerns his father, Sir William Mars-Jones, a high court judge and self-made man with, in his son’s description, “over-developed self-esteem”. His father died 16 years ago, and Mars-Jones acknowledges that there’s a certain amount of one-upmanship in being the one left to tell the tale – when remembering his encounter with the funeral director, it struck him that his father was “my prisoner, as he is on this page, with no redress against caricature or cheap insight”. But cheap insight is the opposite of what he offers here.

There’s a forensic thrill to the way the New Yorker journalist uses his book to expose the formula for modern pop. “Melodies are fragmentary and appear in short sharp bursts, like espresso shots served by a producer-barista,” he writes. “Then, slicing through the thunderous algorithms comes the hook: a short, sung line that grips the rhythm with melodic talons and soars skyward.”

Zachary Leader’s Life of Saul Bellow – long-awaited, and still only the first of two impeccably researched parts – is a magisterial portrait of a writer who was ruthless in his determination to “become great”. Partially indebted to previous biographers who could consult Bellow in his lifetime, Leader nevertheless explicitly states the benefit of writing about him posthumously.

It’s hard to say whether this linked set of fictional pieces on the nature and function of art really counts as a novel at all. Heavily influenced by the Hungarian writer’s time in Japan, it’s a book of fleeting episodes and luminous moments – a frustrated tourist visits the Acropolis; a Japanese master prepares to restore a medieval Buddha; some monks build a temple; the Florentine painter Filippo Lippi paints a wedding chest – but its exhaustive, patient sentences swell to contain whole worlds, and its emotional and intellectual reach becomes almost overwhelming. Krasznahorkai was awarded the International Man Booker Prize this year. The Nobel may not be very far behind.

Richard Mabey's new book, a startling achievement, is so pleasing to the hand and eye that you would proudly hang the endpapers on your wall. Its elegance is also its point: it takes art to communicate science. The book, subtitled "Botany and the imagination", tells the stories of cotton, oak, olive, samphire and many others. The history of these plants' relationships with humans, their uses and the myths they have inspired are explored in a series of essays, all illustrated with beguiling colour plates.

Woods provide the backdrop to The Wolf Wilder by Katherine Rundell (Bloomsbury, £12.99), set in Russia, where Feo (dora) learned to howl before she could talk, and prefers wolves to humans. This original story for confident young readers feels like a future classic.

One of the most thrilling new collections of the year was Don Paterson’s 40 Sonnets, taking the sonnet structure on a white-knuckle ride through humour, pathos, breaking apart, pulling together, melting into prose and rendered with Shakespearean perfection for our modern day. The collection has been nominated for the TS Eliot Prize.

A worthy successor to the sensational Letters of Note and Lists of Note, Usher proves that he there were enough crown jewels left out of his earlier collection of correspondence to make up a sterling second volume: often funny, sometimes very sad, these fragments of history are always “of note”.

When Dustin Hoffman played Rain Man in 1988, autism was regarded as the most distant point within the human constellation. Over the years, it has become increasingly familiar, travelling a spectrum that comes closer to our 'normal’, if we still believe in such a thing. Neurotribes tells the story of this journey, and with such warmth and pace that it won the Samuel Johnson award this year, the first science book to have done so.

The problem these days, it seems, isn’t generating hits. It’s monetising them in the Internet Age. How Music Got Free is a terrific tale of music piracy at the dawn of the digital era. In a book that reads like a thriller, he reveals how one man working at a North Carolina CD plant was responsible for the stealing and uploading of 1,500 CDs before their official release date. Witt estimates that by smuggling discs out of the plant hidden behind large belt buckles, Bernie Lydell Glover cost the music industry $21 billion over eight years.

In the decade or so since Cressida Cowell’s How to Train Your Dragon and its sequels have appeared, these lively, intelligent and beautiful tales about a weedy Viking boy and his dragon have firmly sunk their claws into the imaginations of child and adult alike. This, How to Fight a Dragon’s Fury, is the 12th and final instalment.

Simon Bradley’s ingenious and terrifically funny history of the railways in Britain shows how the coming of the locomotive illuminated our national character. There is class conflict, sex, violence, and a fabulously comprehensive exploration of trains latrines, corridors and restaurant cars (there was even a special Kent commuter train in the Fifties fitted with a mocked-up Tudor tavern).

James’s thronged-to-bursting tale of turf wars and assassinations in Seventies Jamaica, a book as linguistically energetic as it was narratively thrilling, was a splendidly worthwhile winner of this year’s Booker Prize.

Margaret Thatcher asked Charles Moore to write her official biography in 1997, when he was Editor of this newspaper. He had unrestricted access to her personal papers, and she encouraged those close to her to speak to him. This second volume covers the period between the end of the Falklands War and Mrs Thatcher’s third election victory. Moore demonstrates that this era of (in retrospect) cast-iron success was felt at the time to be one of great vulnerability. Thatcher’s hysteria on a single day during her final election campaign – eyes flashing with hatred, according to one witness, “like a dog about to bite you” – is recounted in thrilling detail.

Elena Ferrante’s terrifyingly good Neapolitan quartet of novels reached its conclusion in The Story of the Lost Child, after tracking its pair of childhood friends through 50 fraught years of Italian politics, crime, academia and affairs of the heart; like its predecessors, this one had a grip of iron.

In a year that has seen the publication of Ruth Scurr’s groundbreaking Life of John Aubrey, it’s hard not to wonder why everyone else bothers. Oh, you think, it’s because they started writing their books when the earth was still flat. Scurr’s ambitiously inventive decision was this: she would not describe Aubrey, the 17th-century collector of lives, fashions and arcana. Instead, she would resurrect him, allowing his life to be told in his own words, collating found passages of text chronologically and updating his spellings, as if curating his collection rather than making something new. Aubrey’s voice is exceptional, and Scurr’s fragmentary form perfectly suited to her subject’s magpie preoccupations. It works with dazzling immediacy.